Nature Climate Change Comment: Reconsidering space-for-time substitution in climate change ecology
I am excited to share a Comment in Nature Climate Change titled: “Reconsidering space-for-time substitution in climate change ecology” outlining how traditional climate envelope forecasting approaches hide transient risks for biodiversity loss and extinction.
This was led by Dr. Margaret Evan’s and a team of 11 coauthors working on forecasting and prediction who have converged on similar ideas about the risks and challenges of traditional climate envelope forecasts.
This comment outlines some issues and solutions to the problem of “space-for-time substitution (SFTS)” in predicting the growth, survival and regeneration of species under novel conditions. Some of our recent research (co-produced by Margaret Evans, Sharmila Dey, and myself) found that temporal responses (from tree ring timeseries) and spatially estimated responses (i.e. SFTS from occurrence data) were opposite in sign for over half of the the range of Pinus edulis. This mismatch highlighted how a climate envelope forecasts could miss potential population declines, and led our about solutions needed to address this issue.
Citation: Evans, M.E.K., Adler, P.B., Angert, A.L. et al. Reconsidering space-for-time substitution in climate change ecology. Nat. Clim. Chang. (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02392-0
